In many places there are reproduction centers or inplant reproduction centers. For example, in industry there are inplant reproduction centers. In commercial houses there are inplant reproduction centers. Also, in various government agencies there are inplant reproduction centers. These reproduction centers may produce cataloges, maintenance manuals for equipment, instruction books for operating equipment, brochures, sales material and specifications for bidders to use in making a bid. These are only a few of the uses to which a reproduction center may be used.
In a reproduction center there is used a printing machine such as an offset duplicator or copier. The printed material from the offset duplicator must be collated so as to be made into the catalog, manual, instruction book and the like. It is possible to collate the printed material by hand. However, the cost of collating material manually is expensive and therefore self-defeating. As a result, at the present time, very few places use manual labor to collate the printed material.
In the last few years, in order to lessen the manual labor in the collation process and in order to lessen the cost and also to lessen the time required for collating, there has been developed apparatus to assist in the collating of the printed material. This apparatus or collator has taken the form of a series of vertical bins. Each bin receives a copy of the printed material. There is a feeding apparatus for feeding the printed material to the bins. From experience, the number of vertical bins in a vertical column has been established as 52 bins.
The feeding apparatus in feeding the printed material or printed sheet to a column of bins will feed the necessary sheets to one column of bins and then the column of bins in the feeding apparatus will move with respect to each other. In this time that the column of bins and the feeding apparatus move with respect to each other, the offset duplicator or printing apparatus is not operating. As a result, the image thickens and there becomes excess ink on the printing plate. The excess ink, upon being printed upon the next sheet of paper, appears messy and sloppy. In order to remove the excess ink from the printing plate, it is necessary to run a number of printed sheets such as say, 10 printed sheets. This means that 10 printed sheets have been wasted in order to clean the printing plate. This can be translated into a waste of time as well as a waste of paper. The press speed of many duplicators in 9,000 sheets per hour which means 150 sheets per minute or two and one-half sheets per second. With a collator having 52 bins in a vertical column, there is required approximately 3 to 4 seconds to move the bins and the feeding apparatus with respect to each other. Then, to start the offset duplicator printing, again, there is required another 3 to 4 seconds. Then to clean the printing plate, there is required about 10 copies of printed material or about 4 seconds. It is seen that this process of stopping the printing apparatus, moving the feeding apparatus and the vertical bins with respect to each other and then starting the printing apparatus again, requires from 10 to 12 seconds. To print the material to go into 52 bins requires approximately 20 seconds. In other words, the printing apparatus, the feeding apparatus, and the collating apparatus are wasting about one-half of the time required to print the printed page.
If the collating apparatus can function for all copies of a printed sheet continuously, then there is a saving of approximately one-third of the time as it is not necessary to stop the printing apparatus after a column of bins has received an alloted number of copies. The reader is reminded that with the stopping of the printing it is necessary to waste about 10 printed sheets. The printed pages can be printed continuously and collated into the bins.
It is my understanding that, at the present time, when a catalog or a maintenance manual or an instruction book or other multiple copies and pages are printed and collated the national average of copies is about 175 copies. As there are 52 bins in a vertical column of bins, this means that there must be three or more vertical columns of bins or 104 bins. A large bank of bins will have 624 bins. Again, to repeat, from the above calculation, if there is used a continuous operating collator there is saved about one-third of the time required in printing the printed sheet and in collating the printed sheet. A saving of one-third in time is a large percentage of saving or a large saving in time.
After the printed copies have been inserted into the bins, it is necessary to remove these printed copies from the bins. As an example, assume that the catalog is to have 10 sheets and that there are 175 copies of these 10 sheets. In order to remove the ten sheets from each of the 65 bins, it is necessary to stop the printing apparatus and it is also necessary to stop the feed tower. Then, an individual can handpick 10 copies from each of the 175 bins. An individual requires, approximately, 15 minutes to handpick the 10 copies each from the 175 bins. This means that the printing apparatus and the collating apparatus are not functioning. There is a waste of time and a waste of the investment in the printing apparatus and the collating apparatus.
With a larger bin system, such as 208 bins, the time required to remove the copies from the 208 bins is about 15 minutes. In other words, the larger the capacity of the collator or the larger the number of bins, the greater the amount of time the printing apparatus and the collating apparatus are not functioning.
The subject invention is directed to lessening the amount of time the printing apparatus and the collating apparatus are not being used while removing the printed copies from the bins.